title: declaration in citrus (i want to give tiny oranges to all of my friends)

THIS IS ANOTHER POEM ABOUT AN ORANGE

it’s a bigger poem, about a smaller orange.

and, well, it’s like this -

you know that poem about the orange

the huge orange

that the poet shares with two friends at lunch

and it is transmuted into metaphor

the orange slices alchemized into devotion and connection, in the purest and most platonic sense,

yeah yeah you know

that orange poem-

well, here’s another one.

i always have oranges spilling out of my pockets and out of my bags

small, palm-sized ones -

they have a tangle of other names clementine nectarine tangerine

i just call them tiny oranges

and i put them in all my pockets and all of my bags, in the coats from friends’ closets and in the crocheted totes

from their hands

so that when we’re out together, the sun bright after the long midwestern winter, i can pull one out and say do

you want a tiny orange

and its transmuted into

have you eaten i want you to be full i want to be comfortable i want you to be safe

i have these tiny bright things, stored away, so when we’re walking by the water, and the city is growling

behind us, and we’re talking about everything we want to be, and where we are going, and where we have

been, and probably about music too, and about trains and about oceans and about vampires, and i reach into

my bag and pull one out, and say

would you like a slice

and what i mean, really, is

let me share a bright something with you i love you

and

you make me soft in a world that so maliciously wants me to be hard - you make me myself - i did not know

what it was like to feel this until i met you -

and when it hits the wrong side of midnight and we are stumbling through wind tunnel alleyways, the whole

messy tangled group of us, many-handed and holding on to eachother and for eachother,

in the darkness, in this depth,

i hold out my peel-scented hands, soft from the citrus, crescents of tangerine under my nails, and open my

heart against the city and the sky and the stars, and i say

i have a snack -

and a chorus, before i can finish -

it’s a tiny orange, isn’t it -

and i say, words collapsing into laughter

you know me

do you want one, though

and it is alchemized into

you have changed my life you have fundamentally and irrevocably altered the trajectory of how i move

through the world i am so glad i met you i am so glad i get to talk to you and walk with you and hold my love

for you in my chest and pour it from my hands and keep you safe and i am so glad i get to share tiny oranges

with you

and i say this out loud, too

and the oranges are rolling out, out, out, of my bags and my pockets and my hands,

and i will offer them always, always, always

and this is another orange poem and what it really means is

i love you

you make me better